If there's one consistent piece of criticism that gets lobbed in Canonical's and Mark Shuttleworth's direction, it's that they do not contribute enough code - or anything else for that matter - to the Free software world. Mark Shuttleworth has apparently had enough, and has written a very, very lengthy blog post detailing how he feels about this criticism.

What happens when NVIDIA decides to stop supporting certain cards, what are those users to do? How is Microsfot addressing that problem that will happen eventually? They aren't doing anything at all, they rely utterly and completely on the NVIDIA developers to solve tha -- oops, I guess NVIDIA won't solve that problem, you need to buy a new graphics card.

Wait a second, you think Microsoft is doing the right thing? Microsoft sucks, their approach to drivers suck. If Ubuntu is following that model, well, that sucks.

That's not how open source works. There should be nothing that prevents you from using your videocard from 1990. It doesn't matter if NVIDIA stops supporting that card, because if the code is available the community can support it, which is why we need the code. Fedora knows that.

No, but I used to use Fedora. And its installer was more complicated for a NORMAL USER than Ubuntu's one.

When Fedora 1? Also, remember that there is such a thing as "too simple" (as in not useful enough). If you compare Fedora 13 installer vs Windows's installer, I think you would find them similar, which means it's ok for normal users.

PackageKit? Oh yes, did I say PackageKit was shit? Quite the opposite, actually.

As for Nouveau, which is an example of ITLLWORKLATER... I still remember the joy of having to force Fedora to use the VESA driver, remove nouveau, add a repo and install the binary blob. I'm sure a normal user that is scared by even seeing the prompt will just go back to Windows!

That's NVIDIA's fault, not Fedora's. And you could contribute by filing a bug and saying exactly that, I'm sure Fedora people would either make sure it gets fixed, or VESA is used by default on your card, which would be enough for "normal" users.

Also, Fedora, unlike Ubuntu, has a philosophy, and due to that philosophy NVIDIA's proprietary binaries are not an option, and that's final. However, eventually the right solution would come along, in part thanks to Fedora's perseverance.

Ubuntu OTOH is not helping in moving towards to the ideal solution.

No, but you seem to have a problem understanding English. And you still didn't respond to my question, instead preferring to attack me.

Right, I have a problem understanding English... you throw an accusation and don't even bother to provide any basis. Rubbish.

And, I did answer your question:

The fontend is improving without the help from Canonical.

See?

Because you keep implying that Canonical is somehow doing a wrong thing by not collaborating.

It is a wrong thing, but I'm sure you cannot possibly fathom why, so I'm not going to try to explain.

The problem, if you haven't noticed, is that most of your fellow Ubuntu fanboys deny that fact. Go to #ubuntu IRC channel and ask if other people agree with you that Canonical doesn't collaborate, and that is a good thing. You would be surprised with the results.

Also, do you think Mark Shuttleworth would agree with that statement publicly? His whole blog was basically a PR spin in order to wave precisely that issue.

No, they're just making a nice package for normal users. Or maybe they're sick of the elitist attitude many Linux "community members" show.

Ah, so now you are speculating without any evidence, well, allow me to do the same. Perhaps Canonical cares only about money and their product, if they could they would fork the whole user-space, and they would use a license that prevents people from shipping that code in other distributions other than Ubuntu. Not entirely implausible, since as you have agreed, they are selfish.

But pacman doesn't work nicely (as in -- not leaving the system confused) on other distros than Arch.

Bullshit. Pacman works as good as any foreign package manager can, in a system that doesn't run pacman, and if somebody happens to write a distribution that is not archlinux, but uses pacman, it would work as well as it does in Archlinux, because they developed it in a distro-agnostic way, which is the collaborative thing to do.